Although the “concentration camp” is most always associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust of World War II, its uses began in the late 19th century, first by the Spanish in their attempt to bring to an end the Cuban insurgency that had begun in 1895, and then by the British in South Africa during the Boer War. The Italians employed concentration camps in Libya in the 1920s as part of General Graziani’s “pacification” program and in 1942 the United States put 112,000 persons of Japanese descent, most of whom were U.S. citizens, into camps.
Early Use of Concentration Camps
Concentration camps, derived perhaps from the Spanish term reconcentrado, refer to militarily supervised installations usually located in remote areas designed to contain or house thousands of civilians, usually anyone considered a threat to the regime. In the case of Spain and Britain, the concentration of civilians into camps was also accomplished to deprive the enemy in the field fighting a guerrilla war of local support. In some ways, the “Hamlet” strategy employed by the U.S. in Vietnam had the same goals in mind. Although not “concentration camps,” the strategic hamlets uprooted peasants and created indigenous antipathy.
The Spanish reconcentrados placed nearly all of Cuba’s native population into camps, causing U.S. President William McKinley to remark that this “was not civilized warfare…but extermination.” It can be argued that Senator Redfield Proctor’s March 17th, 1898 report to the U.S. Senate on the reconcentrados, personally witnessed during a fact-finding visit, was as much a cause for a war declaration as the sinking of the USS Maine.
One year later, Lord Kitchener, commanding the British forces in South Africa during the Boer War, ordered all Boer women and children placed in camps. According to Thomas Pakenham, “Between twenty thousand and twenty-eight thousand Boer civilians died of epidemics in these ‘concentration camps.’” Following substantial criticism and Parliamentary inquiry, the policy was reversed. Militarily, the policy was never successful as it only emboldened the Boer fighters. The same can be said of the Italian camps in Libya.
World War II Concentration Camps
The Nazis built their first concentration camp in 1933 near Munich to house political prisoners. The Dachau camp would serve as a model for future camps and many camp commanders received their initial training there. By the end of the war, the German camp system stretched throughout Europe and included a variety of camp types, from work camps and transport camps to the death camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor. What made the German camps so different was the variety of purpose: each type of camp was part of an integral and highly efficient master plan. The camp system was utilitarian in that it served as a direct contribution to the war effort (labor camps, for examples). Yet the camps also fulfilled Nazi ideological aspirations tied to the 1942 Wannsee Conference and the “Final Solution.”
In the United States, President Franklin Roosevent, by executive order (No. 9066), isolated all persons of Japanese descent living on the west coast and placed them into internment camps in the interior regions. Contemporary American History texts often refer to these as “concentration camps.” Despite two attempts through the Supreme Court to force a Constitutional appraisal (Hirabayashi v. U.S. 1943 and Korematsu vs. U.S. 1944), the camps remained until the war ended. The United States government apologized in the 1980s and granted cash reparations to those still alive at that time.
Historically, the use of concentration camps has done more to indict those nations responsible than to achieve any permanent military or political victory. Even in the twenty-first century, nations may be tempted to employ such means as a form of control yet, as history demonstrates, camps are always counter-productive. The current dilemma regarding the disposition of the Guantanamo detainees in Cuba is a microcosm of this problem. The United States continues to reap international condemnation for the existence of this camp, although the inmates are hardly innocent civilians and may be connected to terrorist organizations.
Sources:
G. J. A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic 1898 (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984).
Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (Random House, 1979).
James Ford Rhodes, The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations 1897-1909 (The Macmillan Company, 1922).
Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001).
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